Spot the web infrastructure bod

April 26, 2007

A thought provoking piece from Jeffrey Zeldman, which hypothesizes that web design (by which I think he means “design of the web” rather than “graphic design that happens to be on the web”) is a hidden profession.

This is increasingly true here also. CrystalEye is as much a web design project as well as a data project. When we talk about web information architectures for data repositories, for WWMM, for polymer and other chemical ontologies, for data QA, we are talking about web design.

In academic research I suspect that things have ever been thus – job descriptions rarely describe the entirety of the skills an individual will use. But web design, just like software engineering, is an important part of progressing the chemoinformatics state-of-the-art.